To start this refactoring, I first renamed the update-item-quality function to update-item-quality-old. Then I created a multimethod called update-item-quality with :name as dispatch function and with a method associated to its default dispatch that called the update-item-quality-old function:

This new version behaved exactly like the previous one and it was a good base to do the refactoring in small steps (one branch at a time) because every dispatch value not associated yet with a function was calling the old code thanks to the default dispatch.

Next I wrote a defmethod associated to the Age Brie item, copied the code from the Age Brie branch in update-item-quality-old into it and deleted the branch and the aged-brie? query helper. After this change all the tests were still passing.

Then I continued eliminating the rest of the branches in the cond of the update-item-quality-old function and their associated query functions.

Once I finished wit all the branches, I had replaced the conditional with polymorphism and could safely delete update-item-quality-old. I also changed the method associated with the default dispatch to make it just returned the received item (this was what got executed for the Sulfuras item and it corresponded to the :else branch of the cond in the old code).

To finish the refactoring I extracted the update-regular-item-quality helper to remove some duplication in some defmethods and moved the code that updated the quality into a separate name space, gilded-rose.item-quality: